Heart Attack Kills More Women!

In the United States, statistics show that more women die of coronary heart disease compared to men. In the past, heart disease used to be a man’s health issue. But these days, numbers are showing that this is already a health concern that many women should take more seriously.

The first key to reduce your risk of heart disease is learning more about it. Here are helpful findings about heart disease from the most recent studies.

Women and Heart Issues

A heart attack is likely to be more fatal in women.
Women are more likely to die from a heart attack compared to men because most women usually delay going to the doctor to seek treatment for symptoms that point to a heart attack. Statistics reveal that 52% of women who have their first heart attack die from having a sudden cardiac arrest while it’s only 42% in men. The same numbers still show up even when women don’t have that much blockages in their blood vessels. These recent findings are an eye-opener to doctors and women should start being concerned more about the health of their heart. Cancer is usually the top concern of many women in the U.S. rather than heart disease even though statistics revealed that 1 woman dies out of every 2.6 women in the United States from heart disease while in cancer, the number of fatality is 1 out of every 4.6 females. One key reason may be that women are not usually aware the seriousness of the progression of the heart disease. In part the reason may be because women don’t often visit their cardiologists as frequent as men do. In addition, numerous doctors don’t give the kind of aggressive treatment that they do to men although the American Heart Association guidelines for treating women are the same as the guidelines for men.

Women show different symptoms of the disease
The medical world used to believe that women are less prone to suffering from heart disease. This misperception can be because of the fact that women exhibit different symptoms of the disease compared to men. In men, the classic symptom of a heart attack is angina or pain in the chest. Women experience what we call as the “angina equivalent”. Women having a heart attack usually feel pain in their upper back, experience fatigue, too much sweating as well as shortness of breath. The angina equivalent is not as well known, clear and dramatic as angina itself.

Broken Heart Syndrome
The broken heart syndrome refers to the condition of elderly women who are dealing or have dealt recently with an emotional distress then experienced a heart attack. The condition is brought about by stressful events but it is temporary. In this case, everything points to a heart attack but blockages are not present but it is still a heart attack. In broken heart syndrome, the heart is deprived of oxygen because of a response to a flood of stress hormones. The heart muscle receives acute damage but not too bad to last for an extended time. Usually the condition reverses itself in a span of days.